Kuwaitis’ Attitudes towards Vehicles’ Stickers in Kuwait: A Sociolinguistic Investigation

Abstract

Language attitudes cover a wide variety of emphases, and the reasons for studying language attitudes attract sociolinguists. Language attitudes may well tackle issues extend to all sociolinguistic and social psychological phenomena, such as how we locate ourselves socially and how we relate to other individuals and groups. They may also shape our behaviors and experiences. This study investigates Kuwaitis' Attitudes towards vehicles' stickers in Kuwait. Data were collected from responses to 17 items -questionnaire and 1 open-ended question aimed at investigating Kuwaitis' attitudes towards the content (political, religious, aesthetic, etc. and the shape (size, color, etc.) of vehicles' stickers. Findings were analyzed statistically. Means, Standard deviations, T-tests, and ANOVA were utilized. Results show that Kuwaitis, in general expressed negative attitudes towards both the content and the shape of the stickers. The open-ended question data provided inclusive data as to the reasons behind such a negative attitude.

The role and status of the English language in Kuwait

“…Now English is not only expanding to a number of domains beyond the school domain, such as social, government, and business, but it is also the most prestigious language, as I show in following sections. It is extensively used in restaurants, cafes, shops, at home, in business, science and technology, and in the media (Dashti, 1998). Both the government and private sectors prefer to employ those applicants who have a good command of English.…”

Words on Wheels: Investigating Car Inscriptions in Jordan

“…Şad & Kutlu (2009, p. 39) assert that "[w]hen youth cannot find people to listen to them, they may express their strongly felt internal experiences and emotions safely by writing" graffiti. Correspondingly, Dashti (2017) reveals that education is inversely propositional to car inscriptions. In other words, Dashti found that the higher the education levels of the participants were, the more they denounced the phenomenon of car graffiti.…”

“…One might also argue that writers on cars want more than 'tag' themselves as the messages on cars cover various themes and serve multiple functions. Several terms are used in the literature to refer to 'car or vehicle graffiti', such as "bumper stickers" (Case, 1992;Bloch, 2000), "vehicle stickers" (Chiluwa, 2008;Dashti, 2017), "truck graffiti" (Basthomi, 2009;Farnia, 2013), "lorry inscriptions" (van der Geest, 2009), "writing on cars" (Al-Qatamin, 2011;Izz al-Din, 2018), "car written manuscripts" (Divsalar & Nemati, 2012), "graffiti on public service vehicles" (Oganda and Mogambi, 2015), "inscriptions on vehicles" (Taluah & Musah, 2015) "vehicle graffiti" (El-Nashar & Nayef, 2016) and "writing on the glass of cars" (Al-Smady, 2016). The term "car inscriptions" will be used throughout this study.…”

“…The researchers attribute this usage to the high frequency of Quranic and religious citations in the data that are typically written in Standard Arabic, the medium of the Holy Quran. In Kuwait, Dashti (2017) probes the attitudes towards car stickers. The findings unfold negative attitudes towards both the content (religious, political, etc.)…”